Throughout the year, I share suggested readings for parents and educators. If you are interested in stopping by to review any or all of the books, let me know.
“There is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying, than true adulthood. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory.” (Toni Morrison)
Good Influence: Teaching the Wisdom of Adulthood, by Daniel Heischman
Young people desperately seek to develop an inner core that will not only rescue them in times of distress, but also help them to define and shape moral convictions, passions, and interests in building a better world. To find this inner coherence, they turn to their parents and teachers — the adults who are supposed to know them better than they know themselves. But these same adults are often driven and desperate to stay young, and are unclear how to achieve the wisdom and maturity of an elder to put the needs of their children and students above their own. Young people do not want us to become part of “their” world, according to author Dan Heischman, but they invite us — and need us — to be different… to be adults, for them. This book will help adults understand what young people are searching for, describe how to have a lasting impact on your children’s or student’s development, teach credible models of adulthood, and guide adults towards achieving the passion and wisdom for spiritual mentorship. Drawing on thirty years of experience with parents, teachers, and students, the author uses stories and sound principles not so much to help bridge the generation gap, but to use the natural difference in maturity as a basis and guideline for more effective communication and connection. (Paula Lawrence Wehmiller)
“When I feel recognized and have a sense that you understand how I am experiencing my experience, I can find your limit setting tolerable and even a relief.” (Robert Keegan, The Evolving Self)
“One of the saddest things in the world is to see a cynical young person. Because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.” (Maya Angelou)
The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other, by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
For every parent who has ever suffered the anxiety of a parent-teacher conference, this book is an incredibly honest and insightful look at the undercurrents in this essential relationship between a child’s parents and teachers. Lawrence-Lightfoot, Harvard professor of education, explores the dynamics at work in the parent-teacher conference, from the subtle institutional barriers that make parents feel unwelcome to the defensiveness of teachers who feel their competence is being challenged. The author draws on her own experiences as a student and a parent as well as narratives from an economic and racial cross section of parents and teachers. She begins by exploring the reverberations of the parents’ and teachers’ own past experiences as students and how that experience haunts the present. She explores often unacknowledged or even unrecognized psychological and social factors, and she offers much useful advice for both parents and teachers on achieving the cooperation needed to reach the common goal of educating children. (Vanessa Bush, American Library Association)
